“What?” I shot up and stumbled back. “What?”
My brain stopped working. The room went black at the edges, like I’d read in scenes with certain heroines and always dismissed as sentimental, hyperbolic writing. How could she be pregnant? Was it even mine? Mary wasn’t the cheating kind, but we hadn’t had sex in months, we hadn’t . . .
Then the living room came back into focus.
“The day the window guy was here?”
“It must have been. They asked about my last period, said I was six weeks along. The dates match up.” Her fingers laced over her stomach, holding tight.
I ran my hands through my hair, wiped my mouth, trying to come to terms with what was happening.
“What are you going to do?”
“Start eating breakfast, I guess.” She released a quick, nervous laugh. When I didn’t say anything, she continued.
“I picked up some prenatal vitamins and some saltines. Mom said I needed saltines.”
I still couldn’t speak.
“I know we haven’t been in the best of places lately.” My bark of laughter only gave her pause for a second; she was picking up steam. “But this is what we wanted.”
“You’re going to keep the baby.”
“Don’t you dare suggest what I think you’re going to suggest.” Her voice, still low, was like steel now.
“What am I going to suggest? How do you know what I think, when I don’t even know what I think?”
“I know you, and I know we haven’t been happy, but this is my baby.” Her hands broke apart, spread over the small, flat plane of her abdomen. “This is our baby, our family.”
“You’re raising it here.” All I could do was state the obvious, mumble each bald fact as it punched me in the gut.
“We’ve already talked about that. I’ll need some help with the chickens. I can’t lift all the feed bags on my own anymore. The wheelbarrow should still be fine. I’m not sure about the ammonia in the excrement, but at the most it would be an hour of your day. I made an appointment with an OB-GYN.”
She sat there on the faded couch with her gaze falling somewhere between us, outlining details I could barely comprehend. It all felt horribly wrong: Mary’s tightly controlled pragmatism, my monumental panic. We were a parody of what this moment should have been, what it would have been if it had happened a year ago. Instead of a celebration she was giving me an ultimatum, the second I’d been handed in as many hours.
“You don’t seem overjoyed by the news,” I managed.
“I was surprised.”
I made a half-strangled noise that suggested agreement.
“It’s been better lately, though, hasn’t it?” she appealed. “You’ve been spending time with Mom. The principal says you’re doing a great job with the play, that you’re working with some talented students.”
“Jesus.” I couldn’t take any more of this, not when Hattie’s presence hovered at the edge of the conversation, threatening to spill into this nightmare. “I have to think.”
“Peter—”
“I just need some time to think.” I grabbed my keys and left the house, gunning the car out of the driveway and flying over the gravel road. I hit sixty, then seventy, and the rocks that pummeled the underside of the car sounded like a stampede, a hundred desperate, hoofed creatures running for their lives.
Thirty minutes ago I’d been fantasizing about—why whitewash it?—the sexual torture and abduction of Hattie, and the abandonment of Mary in the process. Why hadn’t I gone? Why hadn’t I scooped Hattie up the minute she’d uttered the words and forced her in a car before she could change her mind? We’d be in Wisconsin by now. I could’ve sent Mary an email from Madison, blissfully unaware of this child. I could’ve escaped.
Now there was no escape. Was there? Jesus, could I leave Mary, pregnant and alone, branded forever as the woman whose husband left her for Hattie Hoffman, that girl who was in the plays and not even out of high school? He was her teacher, you know. I could hear their whispers, picture their sympathetic looks.
I sped toward Rochester. The melting fields blurred into rolls of white and brown, and then subdivisions gave way to the car dealerships and big-box stores that lined the freeways on the outskirts of the city. I turned toward Mayo Clinic and downtown, slowing the car as people spilled into the sidewalks for lunch hour, their faces lifted, basking in the unseasonable warmth of the day.